Saturday, October 14, 2017

October 14th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

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Yeager breaks sound barrier 1947

U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter
during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13
German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped
capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he
was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.

For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly
faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise
would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947,
when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1
was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then
released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding
662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket
plane, nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis,” was designed with thin, unswept
wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.

Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager’s achievement
was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test
pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.

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